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When you read Sunset Park by Paul Auster you get the sense of an older New York as described by an old guard New Yorker. New York before Harlem and Brooklyn gentrification, when struggling writers chatted with prodding editors over knishes at deli countertops. When the Dodgers played in Brooklyn and stats were catalogued in steel trap minds rather than fantasy league spreadsheets.

My favorite part of Elizabeth Gilbert’s Eat, Pray, Love: One woman’s search for everything across Italy, India, and Indonesia, is definitely “Eat.” I love the way that Gilbert writes about feeding (literally) her soul with food that is slowly, beautifully, and artistically prepared. Love or hate the book in its entirety, Eat, Pray, Love is worth picking up if only for Gilbert’s description of her obsession with the pizza in Naples.

In recent years historical chronicles of illnesses have made the publishing rounds. Just as one author might tackle the sprawling historicity of the Hapsburg’s, others have recently opted to focus their research on disease. Some have taken a light, humorous approach to disease and decay, Mary Roach’s Stiff for example, as opposed to a more traditionally dense, academic style. The latter, while thorough, doesn’t really do any favors for the lay person.

Disease itself doesn’t necessary qualify as a genre, but the impact that HIV/AIDS had upon the gay community in the 1980s and 1990s created a body of literature about the epidemic. Author Michael Cunningham described his Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Hours, as a book about the AIDS crisis:

It’s tempting to read The Imperfectionists as a case study for the modern newspaper: adapt or become obsolete. It’s also tempting to read The Imperfectionistsas a dramatic miniseries which makes it difficult not to compare it to other dramatic period pieces, notably Mad Men. This would be a mistake, though.